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Educating for Spirituality Project Debuts this Summer at Ruach Ha’Aretz

Do you want your students to experience awe and wonder at G_d’s creation each day? Do you want them to have a personal relationship with G_d?

ALEPH’s Educating for Spirituality Project trains parents, teachers, directors, clergy, and seminarians of all faith traditions to light up the souls of our students. We combine joyful approaches to prayer with multi-modal and discovery-based learning practices that engage and enliven kids’ bodies, hearts, minds and spirits.

Debuting this summer at the Ruach Ha’Aretz Retreat, the Educating for Spirituality courses are for anyone who teaches kids. Learning to access and express their own spirituality, educators deepen the spiritual content they teach. We learn experientially to provide concrete pedagogical grounding in spirituality education, as well as immediately accessible lessons to bring into classrooms.

We hope you’ll join us and spread the word to religious school educators who would benefit from this learning. Generous scholarships are available. Following this summer’s in-person workshops, we’ll be offering online courses in the fall and spring. The Spiritual Educator’s listserv is a place to share quick lesson ideas, support each other in our work and discuss the challenges and opportunities. An online, juried curriculum clearinghouse will be available by subscription.

About the Project

The Educating for Spirituality Project grew out of over twenty years of conversations between ALEPH teachers, clergy, seminarians and lay people about how we might share resources and best practices for teaching spirituality to youth in our communities and with the broader faith worlds.

The Educating for Spirituality Project Directors are newly ordained Rabbis Lori Shaller and Rain Zohav. We have been working to develop this Project over the past two years with advisory assistance from Rabbi Reuben Modek, who serves on our Executive Committee, Rabbis Nadya and Victor Gross, and Rabbi Steven Silvern; ALEPH Board support from Susan Raskin Abrams; and with a committee of devoted supporters of the project including Rabbinic Student Maury Hoberman and educators Latifah Kroff, Yoni Stadlin, Chava Gal Or and Chaya Silver.

About the Institute’s Lead Teachers:
Rabbi Lori D. Shaller and Rabbi Rain Zohav

Lori and Rain are newly ordained Jewish Renewal Rabbis, with forty years of experience between them engaging students in meaningful and lasting educational experiences.

Rabbi Lori has earned Master’s Degrees in American Jewish History and Social Studies Education. She taught high school students English and History for twenty years, and has been a curriculum writer and teacher of teachers in English and World History, as well as in Jewish History, for fifteen years. Her curriculum on Jewish Women in the Labor Movement was published by the Jewish Women’s Archive.Rabbi Rain has twenty years of experience directing a variety of religious schools, creating curriculum and programming, and teaching teachers on such topics as “Heschel’s Challenge to Jewish Educators” and “Using Understanding by Design in Teaching Tefilah,” plus ten additional years of experience teaching in religious schools. Rabbi Rain earned a Master’s Degree in Jewish Studies from Gratz College, where she earned awards in Biblical and Jewish Studies. Rabbi Rain worked with the Washington, D.C. area Board of Jewish Education to develop a regional curriculum on Israel.

We hope you’ll join us this summer and share our excitement with all the teachers you know about The Educating for Spirituality Project.